Yup, remote building and caching is on my radar. I expect it will work much in the same way Nix does now, although I'm being a bit more deliberate in creating an RPC layer so build coordinators and other such tools are more straightforward to build.

The string tweak is transparent to users broadly speaking. IME with Nix this thing works the way people expect (i.e if you use a dependency variable in your build target, it adds a dependency).